Jock D. Mackinlay

Jock D. Mackinlay (born August 16, 1952) is an American information visualization expert and Vice President of Research and Design at Tableau Software. With Stuart Card, George G. Robertson and others he invented a number of information visualization techniques. where he taught courses in Information Visualization and User Interfaces of Mobile Devices (co-taught with Polle Zellweger).

In 2003, Mackinlay was on Chris Stolte's dissertation committee at Stanford along with Professor Pat Hanrahan. Stolte and Hanrahan had extended Mackinlay's dissertation to a formal specification language that combines query, analysis, and visualization into a single framework. They went on to found Tableau Software after Stolte graduated. Mackinlay joined Tableau Software in 2004 as Director of Visual Analysis. He holds numerous patents in user interfaces and visual analysis.

Research and awards Mackinlay has been an active member of the academic research community since the late 1980s. He was UIST'91 program chair and UIST'92 conference chair, and was papers co-chair for CHI'96. He was also on the editorial boards for ACM TOCHI (1997-2003) and IEEE CG&A (2004-6). In 2005, Mackinlay won DMReview's data visualization competition. In 2009, he received the Visualization Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee for his seminal technical work on automatic presentation tools and new visual metaphors for information visualization. Mackinlay became an ACM Distinguished Member in 2013.

In 2023, Mackinlay was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, "For contributions to the fields of computational data visualization and information visualization".